Tuesday, March 27, 2007

We’re talkin’ baseball…

The Auburn baseball team won at Mercer on Tuesday, 5-1. It wasn’t exactly SEC-level competition, but Mike Bianucci had his best day in a while, going 3-for-5 with a home run and four RBI.

Even more encouraging for Auburn was the pitching: Taylor Thompson allowed one run in six innings, though he did walk four batters. Bryan Woodall, who’s the closest thing AU has to an ace at the moment, pitched an inning to help him get ready for Friday’s start against Ole Miss. And Luke Greinke made his fifth appearance of the season, allowing one baserunner and no runs over the final two innings.

Still, that doesn’t mean everything’s OK for Auburn. The Tigers are 0-6 in the SEC and have lost their last 16 SEC games counting a 10-game losing streak to end last season. That’s a long way from OK. Pitching has been the problem lately. Auburn gave up 19 walks and 38 hits last weekend against Florida; AU relievers walked in three runs in one inning last Saturday. And let’s not forget eight hit batters over the weekend. That’s a lot of baserunners. And that’s a problem.

Considering how AU’s pitchers—especially the relievers—threw strikes in the preconference season, their recent control problems are a surprise. So’s the shaky defense; for the first five weeks of the season this was the best defensive team of the Tom Slater era, but against Florida, AU committed nine errors.

After Saturday’s extremely ugly 12-9 loss, Slater had a great postgame comment that pretty well summed up the performance this weekend:

“We set the game of baseball back as far as it’s ever been set back. Lousy defense, lots of errors, lots of walks. It’s not good baseball. It was a poor job by our club today.”

Obviously, inconsistent pitching is the biggest problem for Auburn. Unfortunately for the Tigers, there’s not exactly a magic bullet to solve this problem. AU is depending on a lot of unproven pitchers: Freshmen Thompson and Scott Shuman both play big roles, and so do Justin Bristow and Josh Blake, who didn’t pitch last season. Then there’s Brett Butts, who was solid this weekend but had problems last season, and senior Chris Dennis, who has allowed at least one run in all but two of his 10 appearances this season.

Slater says he still believes this is a good team and that he won’t make any big changes. (Though he said that before Sunday’s game, then promptly replaced Andy Bennett with Joseph Sanders at first base.) And he knows his players better than I do.

But getting consistent production from that group of guys—who, to be honest, have been consistently inconsistent so far—looks likely to be a season-long problem. Starting Friday against Ole Miss at Plainsman Park, we’ll find out just how serious a problem it’ll be.